The current digital era has witnessed the introduction of a myriad of revolutionary and disruptive technologies which encompass the potential to change our daily lives. When it comes to the application of such technologies in the commercial world, this evident potential is augmented at least tenfold. One profound example of such prominent technologies is Artificial Intelligence.
Once a myth, this technology or to be precise, a combination of multiple technological aspects, has now turned out to be an elixir for various industries. Taking its significant attributes into consideration, Artificial Intelligence, when utilized to the right extent and for the right purpose, becomes a powerful chisel to sculpt a masterpiece of a technological sculpture. There are organizations leveraging this opportunity across, Public Safety, National Security, Law Enforcement agencies and the Financial Sector and shaping a better, more potent future for the world, and one among such eminent organizations is Cobwebs Technologies.
Cobwebs Technologies is a global leader in the field of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) and Web Intelligence (WEBINT). The company’s ground-breaking AI-powered solutions started to conceptualize in 2011 by a team of three intelligence and cyber experts with vast software development experience from the defence industry, coupled by unique operational Intelligence background.
Cobwebs was conceived through the realization that modern day Intelligence teams, from both the government and the private sectors, are using very manual, lengthy, cumbersome and limited tools for harvesting intelligence and building mission-critical reports on various topics. It is of the opinion that many of the analyst and the investigators used IT-oriented tools which prevented them from working effectively and focusing only on the mission at hand. The company strongly believes that the complexity of the old generation WEBINT and OSINT tools caused cases where clients who invested millions in such technologies were unable to utilize them after a short while due to the heavy dependency in IT and programming knowledge.
Cobwebs believes that with the rapid development of AI and the Robotic Process Automation technology – the time was right to develop the next generation of web-monitoring and Web-Intelligence gathering technologies. Its solutions monitor and pinpoint web-relations, criminal activities and other various national security and public safety threats with a click of a button. The technology can also be leveraged within the private sector for KYC, AML, Background Checks and Fraud Prevention purposes.
Cobwebs Tech established its regional HQ in Singapore and has been expanding rapidly to support the demand for its solutions across the APAC region and beyond. Cobwebs America Inc. was incorporated in the US thereafter to focus on North and South America markets and address the different challenges those markets present.
At a recent event, Frost & Sullivan awarded Cobwebs Technologies with the 2019 Global Technology Innovation Award in the AI-powered web intelligence market, pertaining to the company’s revolutionary, innovative and comprehensive technology, exceptional customer support, and strong overall performance.
Raising the Bar
Cobwebs provides three primary solutions – Tangles (Cobwebs core system), Trapdoor and Lynx. Trapdoor and Lynx are classified and available only for government agencies, alongside the complete Tangles platform. A compact version of Tangles is also available for selected private organizations and financial institutes via cloud-based subscription.
Tangles is an operational and holistic WEBINT platform which is utilized globally from both prevention and investigation perspectives. Tangles ‘Search’, ‘Analyse’ and ‘Monitor’ capabilities can reveal, extract and analyse data from multiple open sources across the open web, deep web and dark web.
Tangles helps its operators attain unmatched situational awareness and valuable intelligence gathering through real-time, online content search, analysis and monitoring enhanced by alerting, case-management and reporting tools.
Users can easily expand a single lead into a full end-to-end investigation in minutes. Using the smart algorithms and case management tools offered, users are able to profile targets, map out groups, monitor and manage events and achieve operational dominance.
Tangles applies the latest Artificial Intelligence capabilities and can include AI module to with capabilities such as image recognition, face recognition, OCR capabilities, NLP and more to ensure maximal operational efficiency and fruitful investigations.
Multiple Tangles algorithms were developed to be API- independent, thus ensuring the sources remain valuable even if future API limitations are imposed by various sources.
Cobwebs continuously add sources to Tangles to make it as wide as possible with the latest web trends and sources, ensuring it remains very valuable even if future Cyber trends will change or certain intelligence sources will cease to exist.
Sailing towards Glory
Cobweb Technologies’ helm is in the proficient hands of Mr. Ariel Talbi, the Managing Director of Cobwebs Asia. He caters to the responsibilities of overseeing Cobwebs sales, partnerships and operations across Asia Pacific and The Middle East.
With 15+ years of experience in Sales, Consulting and Executive Leadership in B2B, B2G and B2C organizations, Mr. Talbi and his team are focused on promoting the usage of advanced OSINT solutions across various operational domains such as Cyber Investigations, Anti-terrorism, Narcotics, Intelligence Operations, Crisis-Management and Fraud Detection.
Before joining Cobwebs, Mr. Talbi led the Voice Biometrics and the Robotic Process Automation (RPA) business unit of NICE Ltd in Asia Pacific. During this role Ariel was deeply involved in AI-Powered RPA initiatives across many industries and took a leading part in the recent RPA revolution. His RPA and Biometrics experience taught him that what truly drives exponential improvement in results-driven organizations is a strong Automated and AI-based ecosystem which enhances both accuracy and response-time.
Mr. Talbi and his team works closely with Cobwebs’ co-founders and the rest of the global team to review the latest OSINT trends and customer requirements, thus ensuring the company’s products are constantly enhanced and calibrated to the ever-changing intelligence and cyber landscape.
Delivering Distinction
The team at Cobwebs believes that while the field of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) exists since many years – the technologies and tools were very limited, manual and complex in nature, heavily relying on APIs by multiple sources which quite often did not exist. Cobwebs introduced the next generation of OSINT tools and developed a new Web Intelligence (WEBINT) methodology to infuse powerful automation and AI capabilities into the old generation technologies. One of the key differentiators by Cobwebs is the lightning-fast intelligence gathering capabilities and the holistic approach towards WEBINT, combining multiple features into one complete platform that can Search, Analyse and Monitor at the same time.
Cobwebs comprehends that the WEBINT field keeps evolving and thus the company spearheads it with never-ending new additions including AI-oriented capabilities such as Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Natural Language Processing (NLP) with Sentiment Analysis, Machine Learning, Object Detection, Face Recognition, Classification and more.
The Voyage Continues
The blueprint of a successful future for Cobwebs Technologies holds nothing short of redefining benchmarks, since the company is on a fast-track to fulfil its ambitious mission to become the global ‘Google for Intelligence’ and the go-to solution for every Investigator, OSINT Operator or Intelligence Analyst.
While Cobwebs solutions are usually deployed on-premise, the company has been working with leading cloud providers, such as Microsoft, to offer better scalability and enhanced security for clients that wish to use a cloud-based subscription approach.